Posts by SRS

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Why the hell did Microsoft buy Nokia? I just can't fathom their mobile strategy at all. The odd thing is that Windows Phone is now pretty decent, yet Microsoft senior management is conspiring to continually grab defeat from the jaws of victory.

If Lenovo (or any other PC manufacturer) ever did a true and fair audit of the crapware they install for 'our benefit', they wouldn't install it (I wrote fair earlier...) and they'd be back in -ve margins land. So unfortunately that'll never happen, and the bloat will continue. Like all big corporations, they'll hope it all blows over quickly. And it probably will for most people. Was BT really harmed long-term by Phorm?

But I'll never buy anything from Lenovo, and I'll be asking my work procurement team to look into this too and make their own judgement.

Re: What is it with advertisers?

@Neil Barnes: This is the problem: "Advertising *doesn't* work"

Some of the smarter advertisers know this. They know their jobs are less than worthless (in that a lot of advertising probably harms the brands being promoted), and built on a lie, and they're panicking, because their clients will find out, sooner or later. Advertisers and clients know consumers are getting fed up with the constant bombardment, but it's a race to the bottom.

Re: This makes me really angry. Why?

Does anyone here have any other examples of websites, perhaps in the private sector, that have also recently gone through a phase of pointless, badly thought out and unwanted rebranding, leading to frustrated, irritated and alienated long-term users?

Although I'm an Apple fanboi...

...I have to say, Windows Phone is looking pretty nice. At work we now have cheapo Nokias running 8.1 (Denim?) and there are some really nice touches: add words to dictionary from keyboard suggestions, downloads of maps to use offline, tiles - which I'm finding a lot more useful than I thought, and the interface is very clean. So, so much better than the BlackBerries we used to have.

Having the send email button just below the keyboard isn't a great UI mind you, and some of the explanatory UI text is rather patronising.

Progression

August 2014: All tech sites: "This Apple iWatch will be sentient and will cause the collapse of the entire world economy. All problems with all other things will be solved by the iWatch which will definitely be called the iWatch. Literally every human being will own one and they will live forever. It'll run on unicorn tears!"

September 2014: "Announcing... the Apple Watch. We just invented the watch crown too! It'll do nearly everything and will be brilliant. Bye, bye Rolex!"

December 2014: "...er you might have to charge the thing every day..."

February 2015: "sorry, we just had to remove yet another differentiator. It won't have a built in Tricorder and Doctor. But it'll still be quite cool, honestly!"

April 2015: Apple's take on the Moto 360 is released. It's square. It has a choice of coloured and metal straps. It's a watch that needs charging every 10 hours.

June 2015: All tech sites: "OMG! Just wait for v2 in 2016! It'll be sentient and will cause the collapse of the entire world economy. All problems with all other things will be solved by the Watch+ which will definitely be called the Watch+. Literally every human being will own one and they will live forever. It'll run on unicorn tears!"

According to sources close to the source, in the film, Ive wanted some of the stormtroopers to queue outside a certain room in the Death Star for a week or so to upgrade their Sabers (sic) to a longer brighter version made entirely of aluminium. A sub-plot was to be that the old Sabers would get slower and slower, then just become torches.

J. J. Abrams rejected the ideas: "who the hell would queue a week, then pay for an upgrade that did pretty much what the old thing did, only more expensively?"

With an utter lack of scientific and statistical rigour...

...I'm a bit puzzled why the published market share of Windows Phone doesn't match my commuting experience, where I reckon around 10% or so of people using phones that I can see, are using a Nokia running Windows phone.

I also know of one or two large firms where the much-hated and primitive BBs are being retired in favour of Nokias across all locations, so I'd say Microsoft have turned a corner. But see title for caveats.

Re: Fucking stupid ads

Fucking stupid ads

I was enjoying the article, until I got to page 2 where some of the text is covered by an ad for some piece of fuckwittery called Intel cloud finder.

Was the ad moveable or closeable? Of course not. Even worse, it had a little 'x' control - the universal symbol for close - that didn't close the ad, but allowed me to give feedback, including (oh the irony), 'ad covers the text'. Bloody hell. Why not both irritate me and patronise me all at the same time. Who creates this shit?

Well I will never ever buy, rent, lease or evaluate anything to do with finding bloody clouds. I bloody hate adverts. Every last one is parasitic shit.

Seriously El Reg, apply for a lottery grant, put up a paywall, get some hedge fund gimp boy to invest in you, but ditch the bloody ads. Please.

"If it works it'll go nationwide, says telco's top dog"

Yeah, right. Just like Infinity that I still can't get in my area.

BT, or rather the part of BT that customers deal with, is staffed with sadists, dreamers and idiots. Their call centres are laughably and staggeringly inept, their marketing department is er... somewhat divorced (for want of a better word) from reality, and the remaining good engineers are smothered by so many layers of idiocy it's a miracle they get anything done at all.

"Only 15 per cent of iPhone 6 customers have upgraded from other iPhones."

If true, Cook should be concerned not jubilant. Parts of Apple's (and everyone else's) game is to push how desirable their new shineys are compared to the older now less shiney things that were themselves once the greatest shineys compared to the previous... and so on.

So the message isn't getting through that well if only 15% of iPhone 6 upgrades are from previous Apple products. That implies to me that although someone may well ditch an Android phone for an Apple phone, they can only do that once and maybe they'll never upgrade again. 15% says that's far more likely than I expected.

"So was that paper-clip."

Re: Sad, and not good enough

Completely agree, this is heartbreaking enough to read, I can't imagine what the family is going through. Detective Sergeant Peter Wall does indeed need to pull his finger out, and rapidly - because whilst this isn't murder in the eyes of the law, morally it's as close to it as makes no odds.

"I've dropped my S2 from 3 metres onto concrete"

In my dreams, I've seen the iPhone 8...

And let me tell you, it's fantastic! Everything you'd ever want in a phone and then some. The real kazoo! For some reason by the end of the dream it had turned into a bouncing blue rabbit that kept hassling me for carrot soup, and I woke up screaming, naked, on a train going to Slough, but before that part and the somewhat embarrassing court appearance, the iPhone 8 completely trounced whatever it is that Samsung may or may not release at some point whenever.

My theory, if the Internet is interested

My theory is that the fine folk at Microsoft who decide on strategy and product delivery are so very clever that what they do and the decisions they make are completely beyond the ability of most of us to comprehend. Same as Yahoo! and HP really.

Windows RT is a case in point: most comments I've read on this forum have stated how Microsoft botched the whole RT/Arm thing right from the start and are now flogging a dead horse long after the whip has broken and the horse decomposed.

Careful with that axe, Nadella!

eBay should just put the to-be-sacked workers up for auction

eBay gets free advertising, the soon-to-be-sacked employees get their CVs out to a wide audience, and it's a transparent market for both employers and employees. More useful than LinkedIn anyway. What's not to like?

If Valve is like every other large company out there...

Then there will be tiers and tiers of management, all 'adding value', a bloated and useless HR department that somehow just keeps on hiring regardless of the bottom line, an infinitely large Corporate Communications team issuing endless trite and patronising motivational messages, and about 3 developers actually doing the work on the product. Things like this are bound to happen. The miracle is that they don't happen more often.

A downtime of 42.94 hours

That's Microsoft's downtime and doesn't include the overhead that customers would suffer getting their systems recovered and the associated business outages. On average, Microsoft's cloud infrastructure was down some time in roughly 1 day of every 3 last year. That's far worse.

iOS and OS X

As a long-time Apple user(/fanboi), I don't think it's quite fair to say that iOS (or OS X for that matter) have 'lost their way' entirely, but it is true to say that every Apple release now brings a slew of irritating user experience bugs and these bugs just don't seem to get fixed any more. Apple does need to try harder here.

I'm just pleased we've got past the Scott Forstall era of tacky, excessive and unwanted skeuomorphism (a calendar application with fake stitching, ugh! What were they thinking...) During the Forstall years, Windows Phone looked very modern. Now - not so much.

Re: @SRS They're still in deep trouble

Despite the tone of my post, I don't actually want Blackberry to fail. Even though they've made so, so many dumb decisions.

But, whilst I'm glad you're looking forward to getting your Blackberry Passport, I don't think you and those with your tastes exist in sufficient numbers to keep Blackberry going. And for the rest of us, there's nothing compelling about their current lineup at all.

How you would explain to an iPhone 6 user (without resulting to insults) why they should ditch their iPhone and get a Blackberry? You might answer, "why should I bother?" - but If Blackberry won't make stellar phones, they sure as hell need some evangelists.